Phantom Road #15 // Review
It’s 1997. The well-dressed man with the green glowing eyes is demanding that the well-dressed man in the ski mask let his daughter go. It’s a very tense moment. The man with the green glowing eyes has a gun pointed at the gentleman with his daughter. That gentleman draws a gun. triggers are pulled. Blood is spilled. There will be brutality in Phantom Road #15. Writer Jeff Lemire continues a deeply engrossing drama with artist Gabriel H. Walta. Color graced the page courtesy of Jordie Bellaire. It’s a very primal drama that plays out between father and daughter as things continue to gain momentum.
He’s just managed to save his daughter. That was the easy part. The difficult part is going to be letting her go. First he’s going to have to explain to her that he can’t go home. Not yet. And so she’s going to need to go home with an associate of his. She can’t do that. She just found her father again. But he can’t let that happen. He promises her that he will find a way home. The associate in question seems like a nice guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He’s telling her everything is going to be okay. That might be a bit difficult for her to accept given all the zombies that are slowing approaching.
The first half of the issue breezes by really, really quickly. The swiftness of the narrative and the relatively minimal dialogue make the first half rush by like a fleeting dream. This is a very clever approach. When the daughter is forced to leave her father, the narrative slows down considerably. Professionals discuss her mental state from afar in along drawn-out bits of dialogue that amplify what the little girl is feeling. It’s a well-executed narrative vision.
There’s a dark power to Walta’s art that feels remarkably expansive. Walta does impressive work with the empty space on the page as it all migrates across the page. There’s a great deal of tension that gradually expands to fill the page. The emotional gravity of all that empty space feels overwhelming at times ,but not in a way that slows down to action at all. It’ss all quite well-articulated on a great many levels. Through it all, the emotionality of that which is being brought to the page has substantial resonance as Lemire’s story closes-in on the end of its latest plot arc.
And...Phantom Road will return in 2026. So it’s going to be a bit of a long wait for the next issues, but Lemire and company have lowered quite a bit of story into place around the edges of all the tension and so it’s going to need some time to expand beyond the page before readers are going to be able to take-in the new stuff that is undoubtedly coming next year.Fifteen issues in and it really feels like the series is going to live much more articulately on the shelf in trade paperback form than it has as a regular comic book. It has been fun getting to know the story in the slow, gradual episodic fashion of a traditional format, though.
